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Featured in Development

As part of our core values of sharing knowledge, the InfoQ editors were keen to capture and share our book and article recommendations for 2018, so that others can benefit from this too. In this second part we are sharing the final batch of recommendations

Featured in Architecture & Design

Tanya Reilly discusses her research into how the fire code evolved in New York and draws on some of the parallels she sees in software. Along the way, she discusses what it means to be an SRE, what effective aspects of the role might look like, and her opinions on what we as an industry should be doing to prevent disasters.

Featured in Culture & Methods

Mik Kersten has published a book, Project to Product, in which he describes a framework for delivering products in the age of software. Drawing on research and experience with many organisations across a wide range of industries, he presents the Flow Framework™ as a way for organisations to adapt their product delivery to the speed of the market.

Featured in DevOps

The fact that machine learning development focuses on hyperparameter tuning and data pipelines does not mean that we need to reinvent the wheel or look for a completely new way. According to Thiago de Faria, DevOps lays a strong foundation: culture change to support experimentation, continuous evaluation, sharing, abstraction layers, observability, and working in products and services.

Jenkins Gets a Facelift with Release of Blue Ocean 1.0

Jenkins, the popular open source automation server that is used by development teams worldwide for continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines, has recently announced the general availability of Blue Ocean 1.0.

Blue Ocean is an entirely new, modern and fun way for developers to use Jenkins that has been built from the ground up to help teams of any size approach Continuous Delivery. Easily installed as a plugin for Jenkins and integrated with Jenkins Pipeline, it is available from today for production use. Since the start of the beta at Jenkins World 2016 in September, there are now over 7400+ installations making use of Blue Ocean. This wouldn’t be possible without the support of the entire Jenkins developer and user community.

Pipeline diagnosis: locate automation problems instantly without the need to endlessly scan through logs or navigate through numerous screens

Personalised dashboard: ability for a user to customize the dashboard to only see the pipelines that matter to them

Github integration: pipelines are run for all feature branches and pull requests, with their status reported back to Github, so the whole team knows if changes need work or are good to go

The name Blue Ocean was based on the book "Blue Ocean Strategy" and the intent of the project relates closely to the concepts covered in the book:

The world has moved on from developer tools that are purely functional to developer tools being part of a "developer experience". That is to say, it’s no longer about a single tool but the many tools developers use throughout the day and how they work together to achieve a workflow that’s beneficial for the developer... Developer tools companies like Heroku, Atlassian and Github have raised the bar for what is considered good developer experience, and developers are increasingly expecting exceptional design. In recent years developers are becoming more rapidly attracted to tools that are not only functional but are designed to fit into their workflow seamlessly and are a joy to use. This shift represents a higher standard of design and user experience that Jenkins needs to rise to meet.

Existing Jenkins instances should not require any additional configuration after installation. Due to the fact that the initial release targets the visualization of existing pipeline jobs, users will need to switch back to the classic UI for configuration purposes or to manage non-pipeline jobs, with the intention to decrease this need over time. Freestyle jobs are compatible but currently do not benefit from any of the new pipeline features.

For Jenkins developers and plugin authors, the new release introduces a new "Jenkins Design Language", a modern JavaScript toolchain, client side extension points and Server Sent Events.